In the Winter 2026 issue: William Baude on who is the greatest constitutional authority in the land?; Abbas Milani, Ali Khamenei: a profile in dogma; Susie Linfield on the politics of the hardened heart: the Left since October 7; James Wolcott on the very golden age of Donald Trump; Hamze Awawde, a Palestinian’s plea for Zionism; Sheila O’Malley on an argument for tactility; Julia Kieserman, what on earth really happens in the cloud?; Agnes Callard on the moral dimension of leisure; Melanie W. Sisson on the new grounds for nuclear fear; Evan Parks on poems, protests, and the crisis in higher education; Andrew Butterfield on good governance in Renaissance art; Mark Edmundson, Robert Frost may have the cure for what ails us; Steve Wasserman on the rise and fall and rise of American publishing; Yahia Lababidi, the poet as seer: Miłosz and Merton; Constantin Waldschmidt, when Freud and Rilke went for a walk; Morten Høi Jensen on a Mann of the middle class; Celeste Marcus, “I Am Trying To Live A Life I Do Not Understand”; and Leon Wieseltier on the big beautiful mess of the past, the present, and the future. Also including poems by Rosanna Warren, Haris Vlavianos, and Amir Gilboa.
Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.
Liberties Journal hosts a monthly conversation in this iteration of which dozens of attendees ask and answer the question Is There a Moral Aesthetic?
Liberties Journal hosts a monthly conversation in this iteration of which dozens of attendees ask and answer the question Is Iconoclasm Evil?
Dan Sinykin and Morten Høi Jensen discuss Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, the book that Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winnant edited and which was published recently by Princeton University Press.
Morten Høi Jensen and Celeste Marcus discuss their respective books The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain and Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art.
February 9, 2026
“Our most sincere film can seem phony.” When François Truffaut wrote that in 1975 he could have been describing Hollywood’s long and largely sorry history of prestige pictures that, at least in the minds of the studios that greenlighted them, took a brave stand on important social issues. Occasionally, when the material had scope or...
Read More Read MoreFebruary 2, 2026
A Poem for Atash (Fire) Atash Shakarami, the aunt of sixteen-year-old Nika Shakarami — arrested and killed during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising — was flogged thirty-eight times in Tehran in November 2025. (Atash means “Fire” in Farsi.) One, Two, Three, Four, seven days before the flogging Fire began to practice leaving her...
Read More Read MoreFebruary 2, 2026
For days, the last tweet my Twitter feed displayed was about the fallout from a U.S. immigration officer shooting an unarmed white woman. Beneath it, two consecutive tweets from Al Jazeera English reported that Iran’s internet was facing severe disruptions. At first, the timestamp of the tweets shifted; the next day, the hour changed to...
Read More Read MoreJanuary 26, 2026
Mary Shelley was a child of the Enlightenment, literally. She was the daughter of two radicals, the great philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and political philosopher William Godwin. Famously, Shelley’s parents met for the first time at a dinner given for Thomas Paine during which Wollstonecraft argued with Paine so passionately that the guest of honor could...
Read More Read MoreJanuary 19, 2026
1. In the late autumn of 1914, the German army waged all-out war against the small Flemish town of Diksmuide. Having failed to capture Paris before the arrival of British troops on the continent, the German High Command had set a new task: a mad rush to the North Sea, and the all-important ports of...
Read More Read MoreJanuary 12, 2026
In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it on a violent nuclear-armed state. The early results are already catastrophic: between 350,000 and 470,000 killed, at least 130,000...
Read More Read MoreJanuary 6, 2026
In November 1952, C. Vann Woodward gave the presidential address at the annual convention of the Southern Historical Association, titled “The Irony of Southern History.” He was paying tribute to, and was deeply influenced by, the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s just published, now classic essay, “The Irony of American History.” And I’m paying tribute to...
Read More Read MoreDecember 29, 2025
Her dresses rebel in the dark lagoon. Sleeves and bodices swell with air. Anguish in silks, sequined by the moon. Fantastic garlands on a watery bier. Sleeves and bodices swell with air. The waves a dirge: too soon, too soon. Fantastic garlands on a watery bier. Henry jabbing, stabbing each black balloon. The waves...
Read More Read MoreDecember 29, 2025
Most of his body is lost except for parts of a leg, a foot, some toes. Her head’s turned slightly left, still centered on the place where he climbed up on her knee to bless the animals. Empty now as her womb, the small hole drilled in her chest for...
Read More Read MoreListen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.
Liberties Journal hosts a monthly conversation in this iteration of which dozens of attendees ask and answer the question Is There a Moral Aesthetic?
Liberties Journal hosts a monthly conversation in this iteration of which dozens of attendees ask and answer the question Is Iconoclasm Evil?
Dan Sinykin and Morten Høi Jensen discuss Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, the book that Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winnant edited and which was published recently by Princeton University Press.
Morten Høi Jensen and Celeste Marcus discuss their respective books The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain and Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art.
